How to Make an American Quilt Read Online Free PDF Page B

beauty of their skin or their choice of clothing or the fact that their father is not a farmer.
    Now Arthur is lost in the memory of Glady Joe and how pretty and smart she was when he first found her. A little too serious, he supposed, and not conventionally pretty (though he thought her beautiful). And she was fairly well read for never having been to college. Of course, he was a college graduate, but that was more his parents’ doing than his own. Still, he was grateful. What caught his eye in regard to Glady Joe was her love of
Jane Eyre
. He loved
Jane Eyre
too. Such great friends from the start, drawn to each other by a shared love of reading and ideas, and soon he forgave his parents for moving them to this godforsaken town outside Bakersfield so late in his teenage years, because Grasse gave him Glady Joe.
    It is unlikely that he would have thought to return to Grasse once he went to college if he did not know and feel a strong attraction for Glady Joe Rubens. The older half of the Flower Girls, as they were often called.
    He once asked Glady Joe if she wanted to live somewhere else, almost certain her answer would be something like “I can’t wait to get out of this place,” only she surprised him by saying, “Actually, I like living someplace where I don’t feel quite comfortable or welcomebecause it goads me into traveling or reading. I guess you could say that Grasse brings out the urge to ‘quest’ in me. I’m not sure I’d have that if I lived elsewhere. Any other place I may love,” she said. “I might become happy and complacent and altogether content and then where would I be?” She laid her hand flat on her chest. “I ask you, what sort of life would that be?” She struck him as so mysterious, this mix of autodidacticism and small-town loyalty. He thought if he could come to understand her that he could come to understand himself; the key to her was the key to him.
    When they had slept together a few times during a six-month period, Arthur knew he loved her. Glady Joe was not the most artful girl he had ever been intimate with (not that there had been so many, he had to admit), and there were times when the result was more frustration than satisfaction. It was evident that she was trying to please him, but there was something withholding about her when they made love. Sometimes he fought with her. And Glady Joe would look at him with a confused, open look as if she did not know exactly what she had done but it must have been something awful or he wouldn’t be so angry. Then he would take her in his arms and apologize. She said to him, “I don’t think you understand the risk I take for you.”
    If I marry her
, he thought,
she will change
. It wasn’t as if every time they were together it was bad; maybe it was a matter of security regarding her own future.
    Hy stirs in her sleep. Arthur wonders if she always looked this peaceful when she slept. Glady Joe never did. She was serious when awake and serious when she slept. As if she could just not stop thinking about and mulling over and considering and examining the various angles of her day, her life, her children, her marriage—who knew which thought kept her so preoccupied even in slumber.
    Hy sleeps like a woman satisfied. Her limbs are loose andgenerous, expansively stretched. Hy sleeps as if she is casually reaching for something, while Glady Joe looks as if she already has that thing but is puzzling out the way in which to keep it with her always.
    Hy at fifty has the bloom of young womanhood off her face, but she has another, equally attractive, quality.
    Arthur feels compelled to kiss her mouth. As he bends toward her, barely touching her lips, she awakens, slides her arms around his neck, and pulls him close.
    Of course, he thinks, she smells nothing like Glady Joe’s garden scent of cut grass, flora, earth, and sky, but physically he can almost convince himself that he holds Glady Joe in his arms, so similar are their figures and